The development of telecommunications technology has provided people with more means by which to communicate with others. In addition to standard person-to-person voice calls, people can now use other means of communication such as text messaging, multimedia messaging, voice mail, conference calling and the like.
However, despite the advances made in telecommunications technology, on the whole communications still tend to be used for one-on-one communication. The lack of convenient ways in which to utilize existing technology for group communication has prevented its wide scale use in this manner.
WO 02/17653 describes a mobile communication system and method for broadcasting emails and voice mails to registered groups. The sender's address can be replaced with the destination group's address upon broadcast, to enable a reply to go to all group members.
WO 98/10608 describes a mobile station for a communications network, which stores groups of directory numbers in a memory. The mobile user can prepare a message and select a desired group. The mobile station then sends the message to each of the directory numbers appearing in the selected group.
WO 2004/008335 describes an invention for providing chat group services to mobile terminals that permits integrated voice and text messaging. Each participating mobile terminal runs a chat application, and a server connected to the wireless network runs applications and components for supporting the chat group services on the mobile terminals.
U.S. 2004/0005040 describes a system for integrating electronic mail, voice mail and fax mail in a universal mailbox. Message receivers may access their messages with a telephone or computer irrespective of the communication medium used by the sender.
Group voice dispatch services, also known as “Push to Talk” (PTT), are known, for example the Nextel iDen™ system. These systems allow groups to be defined, for which group communications services such as half-duplex voice calls, are provided. However, these systems require specially adapted handsets, which may be specific to a particular type of network, and therefore wide adoption of the technology, particularly for users of other types of mobile communications networks, has yet occurred.
Whilst various types of group communication in telecommunications systems are known, prior systems have not been particularly convenient to use, and therefore many users have been prevented or discouraged from adopting the technology.